Even Kids’ Sports Are No Longer About Play

It was the final contest of our tournament, the score tied at zero in the last quarter of a game we wanted desperately to win.

Then, in the rough-and-tumble on the soccer field, someone’s daughter on the other team went down, hurt. She’d been on her way to a goal when she was upended . . . pushed, tripped, then elbowed to the ground by a 10-year-old with one thought in mind. Win this game.

Along the sidelines, the opposing parents erupted in anger. A father among them strode onto the field, veins bulging in his neck as he screamed, at us, at the girls, at the referee.

On our side of the field, parents whooped and cheered, high-fiving the proud dad whose daughter had delivered the illegal blow that would keep us in this game.

And I turned away feeling sick at heart, ashamed that we were making gladiators out of little children at play.

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The news out of Boston last week--where a father was pummeled to death by another dad at their sons’ hockey practice--surely came as no surprise to the corps of parents involved in youth sports today.

The tragedy reflects a growing trend toward violence among parents at children’s athletic events, sports officials and psychologists say. They tick off the obvious reasons:

Increasing involvement by parents in their children’s sports; pressure on kids to compete for college scholarships; our tendency to over-identify with our children, to push them to become the stars we never were.

But those factors might just as well fuel parental enthusiasm as manslaughter. It is the cultural context of our sports obsession that we ought to fear.

Just as we tolerate violence among professional athletes we pay, we often let the attitude that “anything goes” taint the courts and fields where our children play.

Statistics show that not only are assaults by parents at sporting events increasing, but the number of injuries among children in sports is up sharply as well, a result, at least in part, of parents encouraging their children to play more aggressively, to adopt a win-at-any-cost attitude.

We are not just raising the stakes, ratcheting up the level of competition. We are twisting the very meaning of sports; corrupting the lessons it can hold for us and our children.

“There is very little ‘sport’ in sports anymore,” contends Dallas Willard, a USC philosophy professor, whose specialty is the ethics of sports. “It’s all so deadly earnest these days.”

At the heart of the age-old concept of sport is the traditional notion that “sport has to do with the manifestation of character in a context where you cannot control things,” Willard says.

“Like dancing and playing and poetry . . . primarily sport has been a route to self-knowledge. It allows you to know what kind of a person you are, to see what kind of a society we are.”

And what we see reflected in the mirror of sports today can’t make us very happy.

“There is an egotism associated with sports these days, and this aggression is rooted in that,” Willard says. “It’s been building for a long time, this kind of calculated aggression” aimed not just at winning, but at demonstrating power, exploiting weakness, instilling fear.

“So we learn not just to hit a person to stop the play, but to hit them so hard that the next time they know what’s coming . . . you terrify, you intimidate. It’s no holds barred, in sports and in life.

“And that’s your bedrock level of feeling among the parents as they come to these games. They’re probably already in an aggressive mode [from work]. They’ve probably lived all day in an intensely competitive situation where success and failure was tied to the ego. And that ego requires that their children win.”

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There are coaches I won’t let my daughters play for, children whose parents I don’t want on our team . . . folks who view the value of competition through a prism that says only “win.” But I also recognize that none of us is immune to the pressures that watching our children compete can bring.

I have embarrassed myself on the sidelines, yelling at my children to run faster, kick harder, don’t let that girl steal the ball from you again.

I have heard coaches curse at referees and browbeat children until they cry. I watched a father beam at a basketball game when his young daughter delivered a blow--a good foul, he called it--that knocked a girl off her feet and sent her crashing hard into a wall.

And I have also seen a mother reach her own sort of personal epiphany, when she realized that coaching her superstar daughter could bring out the worst in her. “I never knew I could be so mean,” she said, as she apologized for yelling at my children, for ordering them to “stay out of the way” on the basketball court, to pass her daughter the ball on every play “because that’s the only way we can win this game.”

But it is not just about parents and children, about teaching sportsmanship or cultivating good manners.

“Sports,” says Willard, “has become extremely important in our world, winning tied to our image of who we are. The rioting after the Lakers’ win . . . there’s a very clear reason for that. It’s the whole idealogy and spirit that now surrounds sports.”

And we cannot address the problem of overzealous parents by tinkering around the edges, he says.

“Like so many other problems in our culture, we see the outcome and deplore it but don’t go to the fundamental problem. More rules won’t help. You have to go deeper than that. Everyone already knows it’s wrong.

“If someone gets out of line, you cancel the game and everyone walks off the field. You say to a parent, ‘Your child cannot play, they’re out of the league. . . .’ You do that a few times and you begin to get their attention.

“If sports is going to be recovered in our culture, we have to get serious about what we’re going to tolerate. We have to find a way to communicate to our children that the value is not in winning, the value is in the play.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.